Looked at a few headstones in a cemetery recently and it got me thinking about what true success is.

This time of year, success looks very materialistic. Who can get their family the best toys, food or entertainment? Who has the best decorations? Who throws the best party? Whose pictures look best on Instagram or Facebook?

On a tombstone, you have one sentence to summarize your life. I have been thinking about what would be written for the truly successful and a few of the things that came to my mind are the following:

Always put family before all else.

Friend to the strong, the weak and all the strays in the neighbourhood.

Lived every moment.

Whenever someone was in trouble, they were there.

Respected by friends and foes alike.

Never gave up trying to make a difference.

Always made us smile.

Moved more friend’s couches than Atlas.

Loved fiercely.

This time of year, there are a lot of companies telling you what successful should look like. With all this noise going on around you, it may be worth taking the time to figure out the sentence that you would like to see written on your tombstone one day.

Wishing you a very successful week.

Marc

Focusing on what you know, rather than on what you need to know can result in critical mistakes when managing your business.

People will often rightfully say that they know a lot about a customer or a market. But are they the things that you actually need to know?

I have had reps go on at great length about a customer’s family, taste in art and predilection for strange pets. But when asked what sort of product information the customer found most credible, what efficacy, safety or tolerability looked like to them, what their approach to patients was, they had few insights.

I have dealt with brand managers who can site statistics ad-nauseam but cannot explain why, at the end of the day, the customers are not using their product.

Knowing a lot about a customer does not mean that from a business perspective, you know that customer. That is why getting the questions right is so important.

If you want to understand a customer or a market, you need to first figure out where the key points are in the customer journey that affect what they do and what happens to them when it comes to your therapeutic area.

Once you have identified where those critical points are, you can form your questions. What stimulates a patient to seek treatment? Who decides what treatment the patient will receive? What is motivating a healthcare professional to choose one product over another? What are the barriers to patient treatment?

The questions can be pretty standard but it is amazing how often they are either not asked or the answer is just assumed and not based on any real data.

The right questions act as the foundation of your business plan. If you understand what you need to know, even if you do not have all of the answers, you have the best possible sense of your business environment. From there you can build a solid business plan.

If you don’t know what you need to know, your business plan and ultimately your business, is in big trouble.

When an organization looks at optimizing it’s business, they invest in leveraging the areas that give them the best ROI. Those areas are invariably where their product or service is strongest versus the competition. Where that product or service is weak, they find way to minimize or mitigate those weaknesses but that is not where they invest.

Despite doing this for their business, these same organizations often take an entirely different approach when trying to get the best from their employees.

I am sure that you have had this experience at some time in your career. You sit down for your annual performance review and your manager spends the first fifteen minutes talking about what you do well and the rest of the meeting is about your perceived weaknesses and what the development plan is for how you are going to eliminate them.

This is a mistake. Unless you have a weakness that is causing you major problems, you will get a much greater performance improvement by focusing on developing your strengths rather than trying to completely eliminate those weaknesses.

You are a great presenter? Take a course and become an amazing one. Incredible analytical skills? Do a preceptorship in market research and take it to another level.

People who truly successful spend their time doing what they are great at and find ways to compensate for or neutralize their weaknesses. This can be by finding someone else who will cover that element of the business or by adapting their job to better fit their own personal profile.

I don’t know what they do where you work but I can guarantee you this, if you want to be great at what you do, work on your strengths, not your weaknesses.

A very good friend of mine is a physician and I can guarantee that were it not for the fact that our friendship began many years ago in university, he would not otherwise speak to me today because of my association with the pharma industry.

The pharma industry abused the privilege of it’s access to healthcare professionals (HCPs) when it entered what was effectively an arms race adding rep upon rep to their sales teams until the HCPs felt that they were being inundated by an army of overzealous salespeople trying to give them verbal commercials on the latest product.

The natural result was that many of those HCPs closed their doors to the industry and they have never re-opened them.

But should they?

Make no mistake, there is a price to pay for how the industry has behaved in the past. But despite all the bad press, I believe that it is even more important to remember the value that pharma reps bring.

When a company launches a new medication, there is no more effective way to educate HCPs on that product than through pharma reps. The reps are well trained to speak about the medication and provide the tools and resources needed to understand who the patients are that would benefit the most from it.

From the product monograph, to dosage cards to education events, no one is better resourced than a pharma sales rep to help HCPs get up to speed on new therapies quickly.

Pharma reps also provide an important impetus for better patient care. Look at hypertension, depression, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, dyslipidemia. The list goes on.

Were it not for the efforts of pharma reps to educate physicians on the latest standards in medical care, many fewer patients would be getting the treatments that they need.

Even for well-established products, pharma reps provide an important service. Over time, more research is done and product monographs are updated with important new indications and information.

If a HCP wants an update or has a question on a given product, pharma reps are one of the most well informed sources on how to use that product, who can benefit from it and who it should not be used for. If the rep does not have the information, they have a wealth of other resources that they can call upon to help support the HCP.

The biggest criticism with regards to pharma reps is that the information that they present to HCPs is biased towards their own products. I recently went through the process of purchasing a new vehicle. Deciding between two different models, I spoke with sales people from the respective car dealerships. No one knew their cars better than those sales people and no one understood the strengths and weaknesses of the competition better either.

Even though I knew that each salesperson that I spoke with had a bias, I would have been foolish not to take advantage of their intimate knowledge of their own products and their perspective on the competitors. It made me markedly better informed for the ultimate choice that I made.

I believe strongly that it is the responsibility of the rep to ensure that the HCP understands which patients will benefit the most from their medications and even more importantly, which patients those medications should not be used for. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of pharma reps do that. But their passion for their products is by far more an asset than a liability in my mind.

The age of multiple reps going out and repeating the same canned message is over. The new generation is much more focused on understanding their customers and adapting to their individual needs.

As a pharma rep, if you do your job well, you make a very positive difference in the world. Through your work, you are helping to ensure that patients receive the treatments that they need and you help improve their quality of life. Sometimes, your work even saves lives.

So if you are a rep and are out there today, please don’t forget to remind your customers of the difference that you make.

You are exactly where you are right now because you did not give up. And because you did.

Many years ago, I had a business with a friend developing scheduling software for hotels. At that time, the staff who were responsible for that scheduling where largely not familiar with computers so it made the software a very, very tough sell.

My partner and I eventually gave up on the business and found our way into more traditional, corporate jobs.

In retrospect, I have always regretted that decision. Instead of giving up, we should have pivoted.

We were in too early to crack that part of the hotel market but we had a very valuable skillset and experience in developing advanced databases.

If we had pivoted, focused on another customer type who was more at ease with computers and adapted our original software to their specific needs, I am confident that we would have be able to build a successful business.

It often happens to us in our projects and sometimes even our careers that we arrive at a point where we are no longer making progress. We get frustrated and give up on moving further ahead on whatever it is that we are trying to accomplish.

What I learned the hard way is that instead of giving up on a project, idea or goal, often we can pivot.

Step back, look at what you have developed, the skills and experience that you have obtained. Identify where these assets, skills and experiences could be best leveraged and then make that pivot.

You would be hard pressed to find a business or successful person who at some point did not have to pivot. Starbucks started off selling espresso-makers and bagged coffee beans. Tony Blair tried to be a rock musician, Gene Simmons a primary school teacher.

My point is this. It could be a project that you are working on or some aspect of your own life. You have skills, knowledge, assets and experience that are priceless.

It is normal to get stuck. But use what you have learned from your successes and failures to give you the clues that you need as to the direction you can pivot to in order to find future success.

If something is not working for you, don’t give up. Pivot.

In the last five years the number of sales reps employed by Pharma companies has decreased dramatically.

As a result, the fundamental structure of those Pharma field forces has changed. Where once multiple reps visited the same customers (on my old territory we had twelve…), now one or two are seeing the same customers on what is likely a much larger geography.

In the old model, Pharma companies employed a shotgun strategy. Multiple reps saw the same healthcare professional (HCP) for the same product. The reps were trained to repeat a specific message about that product over and over again no matter what their customer’s profile or needs.

The end result was that traditional pharma reps became the rough equivalent of walking television commercials, repeating the same message over and over to a customer and hoping that it would eventually get through.

The strategy was volume would drive results. The skill set required by the reps was an ability to faithfully repeat a message and work within a large team.

However, just like for television commercials, customers started turning off.

This change in the fundamental structure of field forces and increasing expectations from the customer in terms of the service that they want means that the role of traditional Pharma sales rep is going extinct.

I believe, as it should.

Don’t get me wrong. Now, more than ever, Pharma reps can make a positive difference for patients and healthcare professionals.

When a new treatment becomes available, there is nothing more effective than a Pharma field force for getting the word out on that treatment.

If there is a therapeutic area that is under diagnosed and treated, Pharma reps make a real difference in educating HCPs and helping patients get the treatment that they need. Think about the difference in the way that hypertension is treated now versus even ten years ago. Depression, dyslipidemia, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence. The list goes on.

If an HCP wants information on a given product, Pharma reps are one of the most informed sources on how to use that product, who can benefit from it and who it should not be used for. If the rep does not have the information, they have a wealth of other resources that they can call upon to support the HCP.

But, the new generation of Pharma reps needs to have a very different way of thinking and skill set than the traditional pharma sales rep in order to bring value in our new reality.

With fewer reps covering larger territories, every customer visit has to be a great one. Key to this is understanding your customer’s needs and adapting accordingly.

What does that look like?

It means knowing what source of information the HCP most respects and making sure that what you present to the customer reflects that. It could be sourcing approved journal publications, learning events, an educational website or the perspective of the local specialist. Whatever source of information is credible for that HCP.

It means knowing what elements of a treatment are important to the HCP in a given therapeutic area. As an example, efficacy could be speed of action for one HCP. For another, low relapse rates. If you are not speaking to what is important to them, you are wasting their time and your own.

It means earning the right to talk about what you want to talk about by first addressing what is important to the customer.

It means respecting the way that the customer likes to be communicated with. They may prefer e-reps detailing them. Maybe they like to get product information electronically. This generation of HCPs wants to get their information in a way that meets their individual needs, just like you and I do.

The new generation of Pharma reps needs to be able to recognize and support this, even if it sometimes means bringing in an e-rep or local medical liaison instead of providing the information themselves.

The world has changed. Anyone reading this is getting business information in a way that was unimaginable even ten years ago. You choose what sources of information are relevant and meet your needs.

Our customers are no different. A generic message repeated often does not cut it any more. Like us, healthcare professionals expect the information that they get to be tailored to their specific needs and the new generation of Pharma reps is ideally situated to do this.

The traditional Pharma sales rep is dead. Long live the new generation.

Trying to change what people are naturally inclined to do is like pushing a very big rock up a very steep hill. It is possible, but it will cost you.

I was once put in charge of trying to increase the level of field force participation in a company fundraising drive for a national charity. Despite the charity being a very good cause and quite reputable, the field force participation rate had been averaging less than 3% over the previous few years.

I called around and spoke with a number of sales reps and managers. A couple of things quickly became apparent. One, most people believed that their contribution would go to doing good works in the city where the company head office was located. People were naturally less inclined to give support to a place that was far away as opposed to their own local community.

Secondly, corporate e-mails were viewed as general information and were typically scanned and filed quickly so awareness of the program was low.

We made two simple changes. One, we assigned regional champions to send out the communications about the program. Human nature being what it is, the reps were much more likely to read and pay close attention to something from one of their local colleagues as opposed to a general communication from head office.

Secondly, we wanted to raise awareness of the fact that the money went into their own community and not another. So, as part of the donation process, we asked the reps to check off from a list the name of the local branch of the charity that their contribution would be sent to.

Not big changes but instead of going against human nature, we were now going with it. That year, the field force participation rate in that charity went from 3 to 49%.

For some reason, be it with our companies or our teams, we often do things that run against human nature. Some of the biggest team and brand performance turn-arounds that I have been able to accomplish in my career have come from recognizing and adapting to how human nature was affecting behavior.

No matter what your role, human nature is a primary driver of how your customers, your colleagues and even the members of your family act.

I guarantee that if you start working with human nature and not against it, those rocks will be a lot easier to move.

One of my favorite stories is that of the four blind men and the elephant. When asked to describe the elephant, the blind man standing at the trunk described it as being like a snake, the one standing beside a leg described it as being like a tree, the blind man at the tail like a vine and the one on it’s back described the elephant as being like a whale.

With the rapid changes in technology and our business environments, more and more we are being forced to become increasingly specialized no matter what our role. One of us will know the “trunk” of our business environment extremely well, another the leg, another the tail and so on.

The challenge is that no matter how well you understand your particular piece of the puzzle, it is increasingly difficult to have a global understanding of your business environment.

So, how do we make sure that we are getting that big picture?

Like the four blind men, if you want to see and understand you’re your larger business environment, now more than ever you need to actively seek the perspective of others.

I call this being a proactive learner and the people who are able to do this well are invariably very successful in whatever they do.

Being a proactive learner means going beyond just listening to suggestions given at meetings by colleagues. Being a proactive learner means making a point of seeking out people with different views on your business, sitting down with them, asking questions and getting their perspective and insights.

Not everyone will speak up at a meeting and even when they do, the perspective and advice that they give is a simplified, politically correct version of what they know and are thinking.

If you want an effective vision of your business environment, you need to go out and pro-actively seek people’s opinions and perspectives on that environment be they your customers, colleagues or suppliers.

It is only when you get those different viewpoints that, like those four blind men, you can put together a coherent vision of the bigger picture.

If you can take the time and pro-actively get the perspective that others have of your business environment, just like those four blind men, you could learn that the animal standing in front of you is very different from what you first imagined.

If you are in a role that you do not seem to be fitting into, maybe it is time to make that role fit you.

My first “real” job was as a pharma sales rep. I learned to love being a sales rep but back then, fresh out of school, the last thing that I could picture myself doing was sales.

I was and have always been the King of the Nerds. The idea of going out and spending my day talking to strangers and trying to sell them something completely terrified me.

I had just finished spending three years working on my MSc. looking at how the genes for a really nasty poison made by Castor Bean plants were expressed. Outside of figuring out how turn a graduated cylinder, screw-top test tube and some liquid nitrogen into a rocket launcher, I had not really distinguished myself much in the laboratory while I worked to get that degree.

On the other hand, during that time I had gotten heavily involved in student politics. I was good at it and it was there that I realized that I could really make a difference figuring out how to make teams and organizations work better. I thought that a career in business would be a great way to pursue this passion.

So Plan A, a career as a researcher was out and I needed to figure out what exactly Plan B would look like fast because now that I had graduated, my school loans were coming due.

To buy myself some time, I sent resumes to anyone who would take them, got an interview and was hired as a pharma sales rep.

I spent my first month as a rep breaking into a cold sweat every time that I set foot in a doctor’s office. Over time the nasty sweating problem disappeared but it was never and still is not my comfort zone.

My sales skills were awful and trying to do a classic close on a call was almost physically painful for me. Compared to the model of a sales rep that I had been trained to be, I was simply terrible.

What turned it around for me was that despite not being terriblygifted at working in a laboratory environment, I was strong on the science side. Not Mr. Charisma with the physicians but man, I knew the science behind the product and could explain it in a way that clearly showed how it helped the patients.

I leveraged the Hell out of this ability. It gave me credibility with the healthcare professionals and over time, played a big role in helping me to be successful in my job as a sales rep.

Doing this also helped me to learn to love my job because it played to my strengths and it reminded me of how we make a difference for patients.

Many people believe that if you want to be greatat something, it is important that you are a good fit for whatever that something is.

As I said above, I would argue that if you are in a role that you do not seem to be fitting into, maybe it is time to make that rolefit you.

Figure out what you are great at and then look at how you can leverage this in the job that you have today. Don’t try to fit into someone else’s mold of what the job should look like. Make it your own. Use the strengths and passions that you already have.

If you are a Brand Manager who loves strategy and is not into details, be great at strategy and find someone to help you with the details. If you are a sales rep who is passionate about community service, find a way to build that passion into what you do in your work.

I am not saying that it is always easy, but you will have much more success adapting your job to your strengths than you will ever have trying to minimize your weaknesses.

We all aspire to be great at what we do. If you want to realize that aspiration, think about what you are naturally great at and why you love being great at it.

Then, make it happen.

People are funny. If you want to know what the politically correct answer is, putting them in a fluorescent litmeeting room with a group of their colleagues will get if for you.

Not sure it is always the real answer though.

I remember doing a series of consultant meetings for a pain medication that I was working on. In anticipation of a potential new indication, we were asking questions about what the participant’s treatment protocols were, who they referred the patients to and how they followed up with those patients.

Meeting after meeting the answers that we got were pretty standard with each medical professional outlining a pretty extensive series of things that they did to make sure that the patients got the care that they needed.

After one of the meetings, I bumped into a participant and we started talking. One thing led to another in the conversation and we ended up discussingthe patients afflicted with the disease covered by our potential new indication. Very different from what this person had said in the actual meeting, they admitted that to the fact that theyactually hated dealing with that type of patient and referred them to someone else as quickly as theypossibly could.

In subsequent meetings the feedback was often the same.The medical professionals genuinely believed that they were doing the best that they could for the patients and took all the required steps. But, when you dug deeper, they would admit to referring this type of patient out the first chance that they got. In their mind they were giving full support to the patients but in reality they were often unloading those patients as quickly as possible.

It was no different when I worked in the area of sexual health. Virtually all doctors, nurses and pharmacists believed that they had great relationships with their patients and those same patients would be completely comfortable talking to them about the most intimate details of their sexual lives. But, when asked how often that would actually happen, very few could recall having had a conversation with a patient about their sexual health.

If you have been a sales rep you have no doubt met those doctors who would tell you that they spend all the time needed to make sure that each of their patient’s health needs are taken care of appropriately. All the while you know that they try to keep the time they spend with each of those patients down to a five-minute maximumper appointment.

Make no mistake. People almost always believe what they say to you about how they connect and work with others. That does not always mean that it is true.

After many years of seeing it in different forms, I have come to the conclusion that there are some things that we just need to believe about ourselves.

I need to believe that I am a good parent to my children and a good partner to my girlfriend. I need to believe that I am a good person.

When my behaviors don’t reflect exactly how I imagine myself to be, my first instinct is to find ways to rationalize those behaviors instead of changing them or, the image that I have of myself.

I am working ongetting better about this…

We are all like that and our customers are no different. They need to believe that they are good people, parents and partners. They also need to believe that they are good at what they do professionally.

But if you want to help a customer and the patients that they take care of, you need to be aware of and adapt to this.

Whether it is a customer, a colleague or your children, you need to respect, recognize and sometimes even support what they believe about themselves.

But,at the same time, you need to watch what they actually do. Then, provide solutions based on what they do, not what they say.

Anything else will be a waste of their time and your own.

My daughter and I had a huge fight. It was mid fall and we had a surprise snowfall and temperature drop. It was below freezing outside with 6 inches of snow on the ground.

Despite this, my oldest daughter, who attends private school, was going to go to school wearing her summer uniform, which was a skirt, shirt and socks but no leggings to cover her legs.

I tried to point out very reasonably, I thought…, that if the temperature is cold enough for snow, she should not be going to school with bare legsand no sweater or coat.

My daughtercompletely dug in. She insisted that all of her friends went to school like this and that I was just being unreasonable. All the other parents let their children dress like this et. Etc.

You may have heard that one before yourself…

After a lot of back and forth, I gave up on the reasonable father having a mature discussion approach and went into total dictator mode instead. I told my daughter that she had to go back to her room and put on some warmer clothes. No more reasonable discussion.

Fortunately for me, looks in fact cannot kill so I survived and she stormed up to her room and changed into warmer attire.

We started our drive to school with her not talking to me.In the middle of the very silent trip in, I noticed a man wading through the deep snow wearing a pair of rubber boots, khaki shorts and a heavy winter coat.

Curious to hear what my daughter would say, I said “Look at that!”. My daughter, in her first words of the drive replied, “Wow, that’s crazy” and then, after a beautiful pausewhich I shall always treasure in my memories for the rest of my life said “ohhhhh…”.

We still laugh about it.

I am not kidding myself. That was not brilliant parenting on my part.It was sheer luck. But, as a parent, with a teenage daughter, I will take my parenting help any way that I can get it.

Interestingly, it was also a great example of how you can create a teachable moment for a member of your family, a work colleague or even a client.

It is very hard to get people to change perspective on an issue that they are personally invested in. Human nature is such that when we are challenged on a personal belief or action, our first reaction, is to go into adversarial mode and think of all the arguments, rational or not, that can defend our position. Once we have that mindset, we have a very hard time backing down from whatever our belief or action is.

It is just human nature.

That story about what happened with my daughter is a good example of what I believeto be the most powerful way to create a teachable moment.

That technique is to use a story or “parable” so that the client/colleague/family member is not personally invested in a specific outcome and can judge the idea as an outsider in an objective manner.

My daughter, when personally challenged by me about the way that she was dressed, dug in emotionally and was not able to accept that it might be a good idea to wear warmer cloths given the freezing temperatures.

But, when she was removed mentally from being the person challenged and saw someone else doing what she was going to do, she was able to see the logic in the argument.

I love stories and I talk about how powerful they can be in some of my videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3iS2HDTxfVmuGXFPv921Ug).

It is not a coincidence that the great educators of the past and present use stories to get their point across.

Look at MalcomGladwell and how he uses stories to help educate on the ideas that he wants to share. Or listen to a sermon given by TD Jakes. Man, can he tell a great story!If you are a fan of Ted Talks, the best ones always contain one or more stories within them.

My point is this, if you want teach someone or challenge them on a belief, use a story so that you take them out of their own context allowing them to judge the idea objectively.

I know that a lot of sales techniques involve directly challenging the client on what they believe or do. Don’t get me wrong, there are times to use these techniques.

But, my warning is this. Human nature is what it is and fighting it makes for a much tougher battle. If you want to teach someone or change their perspective, often the most effective way to do it is to remove their personal involvement by telling them a story with your idea or lesson in it so that they can look and learn from it without a personal emotional bias.

If you want to influence someone to willingly change their behavior, and lets face it, this is the only way that you will get real long term change, this is the most powerful way to do it.

If you were a pharma sales rep ten years ago you may have a story like this.

I just had a couple of tough calls so I was looking forward to visiting Dr. A and seeing a friendly face. Dr. A was one of my favorite doctors. He told you exactly what he thought about your medications in no uncertain terms and had a great sense of humor about it. We saw each other socially and he had the rather distressing habit of beating me badly at tennis.

As I stepped into his office, it quickly became apparent that things were not going to go as planned. When his secretary looked up and saw me, her eyes widened and she put up both her hands in a “stop right there”position.

At that exact moment, Dr.A stepped out of an examining room and caught site of me from the corner of his eye. With an expression of righteous indignation he marched to the front of the office.

Without giving me the chance to say a word, he started. “It is not even 9AM and you are the third rep that I have seen from your company!” Then, pointing to a pile of our samples that was tottering rather alarmingly on his secretary’s desk, he continued “If I hear another word this morning about that *$#%* product, I am going to throw up!”

In the years since, I have thought of a lot of smart things that I could of said in that moment, but of course, none of them occurred to me at the time. So, after a rather awkward pause, I put up my hands and backed slowly out of the office without saying a word.

Not the smart thing to do as it turned out because I then had to slink back in under the doctor’s indignant glare and retrieve my detail bag, which I had left on the floor.

At least the secretary covered her mouth so I could not hear her laughing.

In those days we had twelve reps covering a small territory, many of whom talked about the same product. We were normally pretty good about not stepping on each other’s toes, but some days, accidents happened and that was one of those days.

Those days are gone.

At that time, pharma field forces were used a lot like a hunter would use a shotgun. Pharma companies counted on the shear number of reps and repetition to get information through to a doctor. If one rep did not get through on a visit, another rep calling on the doctor the next week may make some progress. Through repetition from different reps, sooner or later, the information would stick.

Your aimin terms of which healthcare professionals (HCPs) you visited did not even have to be all that great. As long as they wrote some prescriptions in that particular therapeutic area, you would probably get some business if you were persistent enough.

But now, the pharma sales force reality has changed dramatically. Field forces have been severely reduced and so it is often the case that only one rep covers a specific geography. In addition, chances are that the geography they are covering is much larger than the one that they used to cover with a larger sales team.

Ironically, some pharma field forces have not adapted to this new reality and are using the same strategies and tactics as they did when they had multiple reps covering small geographies.

Simple test. If reach and frequency on physicians are a company’sprimary metrics for field force performance, they are probably using the same strategies and tactics that they did when they had a much larger field force.

To use an analogy, the change in the pharma field force situation is a lot like that hunter going from using ashotgun to a rifle.

Now, with one rep, maybe two covering a specific geography, using “shotgun” strategies and tactics no longer makes sense. Even with a reduced list of healthcare professionals to see, you can’t count on repetition as the way that you get your information through to the HCP like you did when you had with 6 plus reps covering thatgeography.

The quality of a call was always important but, in the new reality, it will now make or break you. The HCPswho are seen are more important than ever. With the reduced manpower and opportunities, you cannot afford to waste even one visit.

Before, the primary driver of success was repetition. Now, it is all about quality. More than ever before, you need to understand, connect and communicate with your customer to be successful.

I talk about this in some my videos (Solutions MRC YouTube Channel) so if you are interested in my thoughts on how you can do this, feel free to check them out.

I would argue that the metrics for the new, smaller field forcesshould reflect the fundamental change in the strategies and tactics required.

Whereas before it was largely about volume of activity against a specified list of targets, now the metrics need to reflect the hyper targeted, hyper quality approach that is required.

As an example, I believe that frequency should be a secondary metric in comparison to metrics like the ability of sales reps to identify the important HCPs, how well they understand their HCPs and how effectively they connect and communicate with them.

These metrics are more subjective to be sure but none-the-less are at the core of what the reps of today need to be able to do in order to be successful.

We often don’t realize the impact that wehave on those around us.

Picked up my daughters from school yesterday. Normally I am pretty high energy so on the car ride home I am asking questions, joking and we regularly play “Yellow Car” where you get a point for each yellow car that you are the first to see.Somehow this seemingly innocent game has evolved into a blood sport between my daughters and I. Three points for pink cars but I digress…

Yesterday though, not so energetic. It had been a totally crazy day of meetings and giving presentations and I was completely fried.As a result,I was more quite than usual when I picked up the girls. I asked less questions and canned the usual game of “Yellow Car”.

The girls picked up on my mood, had an argument in the car and when we got home,where we would normally sit and talk a few minutes over snacks, instead grabbed theirs and headed straight to their rooms to do homework. At the same time I headed to my office to catch up on e-mail.

My girlfriend arrived home to a very quite house. We were all off in different corners and no one had said a word to one another since we had gotten home.

It took my girlfriend less than a minute of speaking with me to figure out what was going on. She sat me down, poured me a glass of wine and told me that I needed to fake it.

As she has said to me many times, I need to at least pretend to be positive and energetic even if I am not feeling that way. My mood and the mood of each of the members of the family have an impact on all the others. If she and I are not bringing a positive energy into our home, it can pull everyone else in the family down.

Even though it was the last thing that I felt like, I kicked it up a few notches and started to talk and joke around with everyone. Won’t say that it became a Dickens’s family Christmas sort of evening but it did make a big difference in everyone’s mood and sociability.

Whether it is at home with our families or at work with our colleagues,
the energy that we bring into a room has an incredible impact on those around us. People pick up on our mood and that affects how they in turn feel and behave.

As crazy as it sounds, the energy that we exude and show to others is contagious. If you are with a positive and happy person, you will tend to feed off of that and start to be more positive and happy yourself. If you are with someone who is negative and down, you will begin to reflect that as well.

My girlfriend, being very wise, regularly reminds me that I need to at least fake being in a good mood. When I do that, the people around me pick up on it and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

Pretty soon even I am feeling better.

It is no different at work. It can be a difficult environment with a lot of tough things happening but if you let that show, the rest of your team will feel it too.

Even if you don’t feel it on the inside, just like at home, when you are at work you need to be at least acting like you are feeling positive and happy.

This does not mean that you can’t disagree with people and push alternate points of view. But, I can guarantee to you that you will be much more successful if you do this while at the same time giving off a positive vibe.

The way that you approach your work affectshow everyone else around youapproachestheirs. Never forget that you have a big impact on those people.

So, the next time that you sense that your team’s energy or mood is getting low, fake it.

We generally don’t think about it, but a big part of your success today is because people respect you. When you say something, they listen. When you ask for help, how well they respond is largely based on what they think of you. No matter how smart or well spoken you may be, if people don’t respect you, they will not be led by you. People will go the extra mile for someone they respect. They will cut corners and sabotage those they do not.

It is not just in the professional world that respect is critical. We did some very innovative market research on relationships when I was working as Viagra brand manager. Going through relationship issues of my own, I paid a lot of attention to the things that separated the successful couples from those who were struggling. Over and over again, what I saw was that if there were just one word to describe what made the foundation of a great long-term romantic relationship, it would be respect.
But for some reason, we rarely think about respect as one of the elements that we can work on to improve our career prospects and job performance. My question to you is, even though you are well respected now, what would be the impact on your job and career if people respected you even more?

And the next question, what can you do to take people’s respect for you to the next level? Earning respect is a lot like building up your savings account. It is rarely one thing that you say or do that significantly increases how much your colleagues respect you. It is the million small things, built up over time.

Consistently behaving in an ethical manner, doing what you say you will, working hard, treating those above and below you on the corporate ladder with kindness and respect. People see you doing these things consistently and over time their respect for you grows.

Consistently behaving in an ethical manner, doing what you say you will, working hard, treating those above and below you on the corporate ladder with kindness and respect. People see you doing these things consistently and over time their respect for you grows.

In the work environment, your ability to command respect is a primary driver of how well others respond to you and thereby how effective you are in your role. Think about what you can do to increase how much those around you respect you and make sure that you are not doing anything that could be hurting the respect that others have for you now.

Respect in never a category that shows up as part of your mid-year evaluation but don’t kid yourself, it is critical to your personal and professional success.

No matter what our line of work, no matter how good we are at what we do, we are all going to make mistakes. How we handle those mistakes ultimately defines how successful we become.

The hardest part about making a mistake is admitting that we made it in the first place. By admitting to a mistake you have to recognize that something that you did was wrong, apologize for it and make a change in your approach.

I see so many people who blind themselves to the impact of their bad decisions on the business or others around them. When they make a mistake, their ego, insecurities or fear of change prevent them from seeing their part in what happened.

As strange as it sounds, our mistakes are a huge opportunity. They show us what is not working, stimulate us to look at new ideas and ultimately, help us to make changes for the better.

If you are unable to admit that you made a mistake or you blame someone else for it, you lose that opportunity to learn from it, change and improve.

In addition, when someone can admit to their mistakes, they demonstrate that they have the self-confidence and ethical strength to do the right thing, even at a potential personal cost.

Look around at your colleagues. I would be willing to bet that those for whom you have the most respect have the ability to admit it when they screw up are very good at what they do. It is not a coincidence that these two things are linked.

Everyone makes mistakes. Our ability to learn from them is the difference between failure and greatness

When my daughters were young it seemed so easy to be a good parent. I had to make sure that I made them healthy meals, played hide and seek with them regularly and when they scraped their knees, I could kiss them to make it better.

Now they are in their teens and the skills that I need to be a good parent have totally changed. Most of the time they decide what they eat so I need to be coaching them on how to make good choices.

They are no longer interested in playing hide and seek with me so I am constantly looking for new ways to for us connect.

And when they are hurt, it is never as simple as when it was just a skinned knee.

Whether I wanted it to happen or not, my children have grown and changed. In so many ways for the better, but at times I really struggle with how to adapt and meet their changing needs.

In order to continue to be a good father to my daughters, no matter how successful at it I used to be, I need to continue to learn and adapt because they are changing and I need to change with them.

When it comes to the job of being a parent, pretty much all of the parents that I know recognize this reality and actively work to adapt, grow and change in their role.

This however, does not always occur in the professional world.

I recently did a tandem with a top performing sales rep. During our time together, I asked him what areas he was interested in getting coaching in. His response was that, being at the top of his game, there was really not much left for him be coached on. Maybe some computer skills?

It seems to typically come from experienced top performers, but I have heard this comment in different forms surprisingly often. People are doing exceptionally well at their job and don’t believe that there is much left for them to learn.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Try to think of a job that has not changed dramatically in terms of the skills and knowledge required over the last five years. Try to think of a customer who is not themself experiencing change and evolving accordingly.

You can be the best of the best today but the skills and expertise that got you there may well be outdated tomorrow.

Just like the job of parent, your customers and business reality are constantly changing. If you want to continue to meet the evolving needs of your customers, you had better be evolving with them.